1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention generally relate to network communications. More particularly, embodiments of the present invention relate to communication management based on network and on application criteria.
2. Description of the Related Art
Data communications in large scale distributed interactive systems, such as virtual environments and online games, require efficient data path control. Typically, users have been grouped together according to their explicit interest subscription or on an interest function that is evaluated at the application level. Such groupings have been used to control communications over a multitude of possible data paths and to a multitude of users.
Because of the diverse communication requirements of applications and users, a number of different data communication architectures have been proposed. For example, publication-subscription architectures can provide efficient data filtering at the application level by having an application server group users (and their communication criteria) into communication-requirement based classes, and then selectively communicating using group-based data distributions. While publication-subscription architectures are beneficial if an application's users can be efficiently grouped, such architectures do not take into consideration or make allowances for optimizing data paths according to end-to-end performance requirements, which can be important in time and/or data loss sensitive distributed applications. Furthermore, if the number of publishers becomes very large, inherent network node limitations can create communication bottlenecks. Similar problems exist in other communication architectures such as interest-based communication architectures in which users specify and enter interest-based cells that partition an application space. Such interest-based communication architectures have the additional drawback that the application space partition information must be distributed to all users, which creates problems when the application space is dynamically partitioned.
The publication-subscription architectures and the interest-based communication architectures are examples of distributed content architectures that are designed to support direct communications between a small number of applications and a large number of users. Such architectures have been based on a particular application having an application server or servers that directly controls data distributions between the application and its users. However, many solutions do not take into account network metrics for session management while optimizing communication network infrastructure according to real-time application constraints.
Therefore, a method of using network middleware to provide communication services for distributed interactive applications by using a hierarchical mapping of participating nodes in a multidimensional network/application attribute space and automatic interest-based session management would be beneficial.